“House of Earth,” the book that Woody Guthrie, Johnny Depp and Douglas Brinkley built

An unlikely trio, perhaps, but all have left their fingerprints on “House of Earth,” Guthrie’s only fully realized novel, which will be published for the first time today (Feb. 5).

Guthrie, the folksinger who wrote “This Land is Your Land” and left lyrics to thousands of folk songs when he died in 1967, based the book on his own experience in the Texas Panhandle during the Great Depression. The story follows a tenant farmer in the Dust Bowl, struggling against the elements in a wooden shack, who yearns to build an adobe house.

The Oklahoma-born Guthrie finished the book in 1947. But without the sleuthing of Brinkley, an author and Rice University professor, it might not have been rescued from obscurity. And without the vision and deep Hollywood pockets of Depp, an actor known for his eccentric characters and individualism, it might not have found such a sympathetic publisher.

“I interviewed Bob Dylan for a cover story at Rolling Stone,” Brinkley said, on the phone from his Austin home, “and we spoke quite a bit about Woody Guthrie.”

That magazine story, along with research for his upcoming book about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the environment, pushed Brinkley to dig deeper into Guthrie. That led him to the writings of Alan Lomax, a folklorist and friend of Guthrie’s. Lomax had read the first chapter of “House of Earth” and was so taken with it, he wanted to drop everything to help his friend get it published.

But the trail stopped there. And Brinkley wondered: What happened to this book?

Brinkley called the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives in New York to speak with the director. Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, had never heard of the novel, either.

“We have about 15,000 documents in our archives,” Nora Guthrie said, “but it was Douglas who alerted us that there was this supposed novel floating around.”

Brinkley finally found “House of Earth” in Oklahoma, but for more than half a century it had languished in California. It was found among the papers of filmmaker Irving Lerner, to whom Guthrie had sent the manuscript in the hopes that it would become a movie. The Lerner estate found it when sorting through its own archives in Los Angeles and shipped it to Tulsa’s McFarlin Library for permanent housing.

“Nora was ecstatic and so was I,” Brinkley said.

The two other books in the Guthrie canon – “Bound for Glory” and “Seeds of Man” – are autobiography with a dash of fiction, Nora Guthrie said. “House of Earth” is fiction based on personal experience.

“Steinbeck wrote about people who left the Dust Bowl for California,” Brinkley said. “But Woody stayed in Pampa, Texas, and experienced it from there. It wasn’t just the summer storms that were brutal. The deforestation and drought and winds made the winter colder and fiercer. People were living in plywood shacks.”

In his early 20s, Guthrie endured a terrible dust storm in a shack on the Texas plains, holding a wet rag over his mouth to keep from being asphyxiated. The next year, 1936, he visited adobe houses in New Mexico and began to preach the utilitarian value of adobe in Texas. In 1937, while Guthrie was holding fast against a vicious Texas plains blizzard that churned up both dust and snow, he fantasized about building an adobe house.

“He wanted to start an adobe neighborhood, but the lumber companies would have lost money,” Brinkley said. “Woody argued that tenant farmers should be allowed to build their own adobe homes. So the book is a commentary on his problems with big banks and big agriculture during the Great Depression.”

There’s also a graphic sex scene that might have made potential publishers balk, Nora Guthrie said.

Johnny Depp (AP/Chris Pizzello)

Here’s where Johnny Depp comes in.

Brinkley had worked with the actor before. They co-wrote the liner notes to a Hunter S. Thompson documentary, earning a Grammy nomination for their efforts. (Brinkley was Thompson’s literary executor and Depp starred in a film based on Thompson’s semi-autobiographical novel, “The Rum Diary.”)

When Brinkley contacted Depp to tell him about “House of Earth,” the actor was poised to launch a new imprint with Brinkley’s longtime publisher, HarperCollins. Depp was hunting for titles that resonated with his aesthetic.

“Johnny’s brother is a rare book dealer and Johnny is a collector, too,” Brinkley said. “He has a certain taste for avant garde literature, old-style Americana things. Johnny started his career as a guitar player and Woody Guthrie is one of his heroes.”

“House of Earth” proved a good fit for “Infinitum Nihil,” the name of Depp’s new imprint and his production company.

In 2012, the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, Brinkley and Depp announced their plans to publish “House of Earth.” The two men co-wrote the introduction to the book that year in New Mexico, where Depp was filming “The Lone Ranger.”

For Nora Guthrie, “House of Earth” offers a new point of entry into her father’s trove of writings, artwork and recordings.

“He wrote about everything he saw around him,” said Guthrie, who was just 17 when her father died of Huntington’s disease, a debilitating neurological disorder. “His work is a document of 20th-century America.”

She was thrilled that Depp used an oil painting of her father’s for the dust jacket of “House of Earth,” and that the actor was keen to produce a beautiful hardcover book to launch his imprint.

“Johnny is a lover of books and a lover of paper,” Nora Guthrie said. “In that way, he’s just like my dad.”